from the but-of-course dept

You may remember that right before Facebook was set to go public, Yahoo decided to threaten and then sue Facebook over some patents -- in a move that was widely mocked, especially among engineers and technologists in Silicon Valley about just how far Yahoo had sunk. Yahoo's been struggling to regain any sense of being a place where actual innovators want to work ever since. It would appear that the folks at IBM didn't get the message. They apparently waited until the eve of Twitter's IPO to try the same strategy: threatening to sue Twitter for patent infringement over three very broad patents that never should have been granted in the first place.

In recent years, IBM has, at times, pretended to support real patent reform, but its actions speak louder than words. It's been acting very much like a patent troll, making efforts to block real patent reform, while using its patents as weapons against companies much more innovative than IBM. It truly is living up to the old adage about how young companies innovate, while old companies litigate. Sad legacy it's leaving.

Meanwhile, the company they're targeting, Twitter, not only has built a service that so many people find useful (when has IBM done that?), but also has made it clear that it won't be able to do what IBM is now doing, by giving anyone who gets a patent while employed by Twitter the ability to block the patent from being used as a weapon against others -- something that actually has helped attract numerous engineers to Twitter, since they want to work for innovative companies which actually innovate in technology, rather than abuse the legal system to shake down others.

from the that's-how-innovation-works dept

I'd been meaning to write something on this topic for a while, but with the announcement of the Twitter IPO, and Mathew Ingram's reminder of how it started as a "harmless distraction" before turning into something much, much bigger, it's reminded me once again to talk about why the constant fretting about entrepreneurs doing trivial things is a pointless pastime. First, as Ingram noted, the early days of Twitter had the site being frequently dismissed and mocked as nothing important.

By now, most of us have grown accustomed to thinking of Twitter as a key player in the world of real-time information, a crucial tool for politicians, celebrities and dissidents alike — and even armies — to get their message across. But when Om first got a look at what was then called Twttr in 2006, he thought it was a waste of time, and he wasn’t alone. That perception dogged the company for years, as people made cracks about how “no one wants to know what I had for lunch.”

However, as Chris Dixon pointed out a few years ago, big innovations often start out looking like a "toy." And Twitter is no different. While there are some, of course, who still mock it, many have realized that it has become an amazingly powerful tool. It's a method of real-time communication, conversation, reporting and broadcasting that has tremendous power. It's been useful in all sorts of unexpected ways.

And yet... as always, we still have people who like to mock new innovations for being trivial or unimportant, in part because they often lack the vision to see what it might become. Just a few months ago, there was a widely publicized and discussed article in the New Yorker by George Packer, which mocked the innovative spirit of Silicon Valley by complaining that so many of the entrepreneurs appeared to be working on trivial ideas that were really just toys for young rich kids. The key part that got discussed over and over again was this:

A favorite word in tech circles is “frictionless.” It captures the pleasures of an app so beautifully designed that using it is intuitive, and it evokes a fantasy in which all inefficiencies, annoyances, and grievances have been smoothed out of existence—that is, an apolitical world. Dave Morin, who worked at Apple and Facebook, is the founder of a company called Path—a social network limited to one’s fifty closest friends. In his office, which has a panoramic view of south San Francisco, he said that one of his company’s goals is to make technology increasingly seamless with real life. He described San Francisco as a place where people already live in the future. They can hang out with their friends even when they’re alone. They inhabit a “sharing economy”: they can book a weeklong stay in a cool apartment through Airbnb, which has disrupted the hotel industry, or hire a luxury car anywhere in the city through the mobile app Uber, which has disrupted the taxi industry. “San Francisco is a place where we can go downstairs and get in an Uber and go to dinner at a place that I got a restaurant reservation for halfway there,” Morin said. “And, if not, we could go to my place, and on the way there I could order takeout food from my favorite restaurant on Postmates, and a bike messenger will go and pick it up for me. We’ll watch it happen on the phone. These things are crazy ideas.”

It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up.

Imagine if this had been written just five or six years ago, when Twitter was first catching on, and you could bet that the same paragraph would include something about the pointlessness of updating your friends about what you're eating on Twitter. It's easy to dismiss these things when they're young, because it's impossible to see what they've become. Today, however, Twitter is used by world leaders, activists, celebrities, families, religious leaders, communities, friends and all sorts of other people to communicate, to connect, to empower and to do amazing things. That was more or less impossible to predict early on because it was a a toy -- a trivial thing designed to be fun for a group of twenty-somethings. But scratching an itch for that group can create something with the power to change the course of human history, and that's kind of amazing.

Even with the things that Packer more or less mocks in that section, he seems to miss how they can have a wider impact. For example, he seems to mock AirBnB and Uber for being useful for well-off 20-somethings, but seems to be ignoring the flipside of that equation. Those two companies are also great examples of new services that have enabled many people to build new careers or just earn some extra cash in ways that they couldn't have not so long ago, such as by renting out a room or your apartment. I've met a bunch of folks recently who have talked about how using AirBnB to make some extra cash has been empowering.

Innovation can be a funny thing, and the truly breakthrough innovations are almost all mocked in their early days, in part because of the basic innovator's dilemma, in that the new thing isn't "as good" as the old thing, but even going beyond that, because sometimes we just don't know how people will use something, and how it might empower something new and amazing. This is why it's important to have a structure and society that lets innovative experiments flourish. Too often, innovation policy focuses on trying to get a "certain type" of company to get started. We see this all the time where a government decides it's going to invest in a particular area, rather than figuring out a way to encourage experimentation to see what comes out of it.

Twitter has become something powerful and amazing because, over time, more and more people realized how useful and powerful a tool it was -- something that very few of us (myself included) realized at the beginning. So, the next time you want to mock an innovation for being trivial, remember what people said about Twitter in the early days.

from the leaves-open-an-opportunity dept

Every few months, Google has been "shutting down" various offerings they feel are under-used, in an effort to regain some focus. Many of these are uncontroversial, though a few have been surprising and freaked some users out. Many, for example, were surprised and upset when Google announced it was phasing out iGoogle. But today's news that it is shutting down Google Reader took many, many people by surprise. My Twitter feed blew up with people freaking out about it. For those who use it, many really rely on it for their daily information gathering process. I know the feeling, because I used to do that -- though a few years ago I shifted to mostly using Twitter via a well-organized Tweetdeck, and found that to be just as (if not more) effective, though a somewhat different overall experience that took some getting used to.

Still, a very large number of folks I know feel like they practically live inside Google Reader -- and I know (for example) that Google Reader is a huge driver of traffic to this site, so I get the feeling many of you use Google Reader as well. The thing that seems to have so many folks upset is the fact that there really aren't any comparable alternatives if you want that same basic experience. In fact, you could argue that Google effectively killed off many of those alternatives. Back in the day there were things like Newsgator and Bloglines, but both were effectively marginalized or pushed into other markets because Google Reader really did become the de facto standard RSS reader that so many used and relied on.

Anyway, I have a few separate thoughts on all of this and might as well go through them bullet point style:

This highlights the problem of relying too much on a single provider when there are few alternatives. As such, I wonder if Google may not realize the wider impact of this move. For example, it has me directly rethinking how much I rely on Google Calendar, Google Drive and Gmail. Now, I don't think any of those are going away any time soon, but not too long ago (um, yesterday, according to some...) you could have said the same exact thing about Reader. I'm now planning to do a more serious personal audit of services I use and how reliant I am on a single provider, and start making sure I have working alternatives in place and ready to go. In the end, this will certainly make me a lot less tied to Google's services, which is probably a good thing, but probably not the sort of thing Google is hoping its users will be doing.

As mentioned, personally, I moved away from RSS readers to a purely Twitter/Tweetdeck approach to consuming news. It took a few months of doing both, but when I shut down the RSS reader, I never looked back. It's a different experience, but has some benefits. But, what that suggests is that if people are looking for a culprit for what brought us to this moment, Twitter is the prime suspect. Yes, Twitter and RSS are different in many significant ways. But, in terms of the basic user benefit that people get out of both ("my stream of news & info"), they clearly compete.

The lack of serious alternatives represents a serious opportunity for someone enterprising. Believe it or not, before Google Reader even launched we at Techdirt had built our own RSS reader, called the Techdirt InfoAdvisor, that functioned quite a lot like Google Reader, but which had some other really useful features for us internally and for some of our business clients (we would use it to curate accounts for clients, with added commentary from us). Eventually, we shut it down, because (as Google has discovered), it's actually a lot of work to maintain something like that for a variety of reasons, and soaks up tremendous resources. Still, my first reaction was to joke that maybe we should dust off our old code, put it up and see if anyone wanted to use it. We're not likely to do that (unless all of you start throwing money our way), but someone else likely is going to jump into this space quickly. They may not build a huge business out of it, but I'd bet if they weren't looking for VC-style hockey stick returns, that someone could build a decent business out of it.

It is always interesting to look at product lifecycles, but most of the time when online products die off, the writing was on the wall long before it happened. This one struck me as a surprise since so many people relied so heavily on it, and it seems really abrupt and likely to upset the basic workflow of so many -- especially in the journalism and academic fields. I can respect the reasons for killing off a "non-essential" product, but it feels like Google seriously underestimated the level to which people had built Google reader into their daily lives.

It wouldn't surprise me, given how loud the backlash is, if Google extends the deadline for shutting down Reader, or if it eventually tries to work out some sort of alternative resolution. We saw the same thing, to a lesser extent, back when AskJeeves tried to shut down Bloglines (the Google Reader of its day before Google Reader existed). And, eventually, Ask sold it off to another company who apparently has kept it running (though, who knows how many users it has today). I think that experience actually pushed a bunch of Bloglines users to jump to Google on the assumption that Google Reader was safe. You would think that someone within Google would remember how that whole thing played out. It's surprising that they don't appear to have learned anything from it.

from the someone-else's-bitch dept

For years, we've seen so many legal disputes that could be jokingly described as arguing "felony interference of a business model" -- a term coined by Steven Bellovin a while ago as shorthand for lawsuits that are much more about a company who bet on the wrong business model, than any actual legal wrongs. Normally, this relates to legacy companies upset at upstarts who win through the disruptive judo of taking a totally different approach. But it can be seen in other arenas as well. We've also talked, for example, about how odd it is that some companies appear to base their entire business on what some other company does -- and they seem wholly unprepared for a situation in which the company they are 100% reliant on changes. As venture capitalist Fred Wilson has summarized, a good company can't be someone else's bitch.

Both of those concepts seem relevant given the news that a startup called PeopleBrowsr has successfully obtained a temporary restraining order against Twitter for changing how it doles out access to its "Firehose" (i.e., the raw stream of all public tweets). As has been covered widely, over the last few months, Twitter has really clamped down on some of its more open practices lately. I actually agree with many people that I'm not sure this is a smart long-term business move, but I can't see how it could possibly be a legal violation. Yet, that's what PeopleBrowsr appears to be claiming. Of course, its Firehose offering has long been an offering that companies had to work out a deal with Twitter to get access to, so even then it was never fully "open."

As part of the changing business strategy, Twitter has cut off many of its "Firehose" partners, including PeopleBrowsr. In response, PeopleBrowsr sued arguing that this change has a negative impact on PeopleBrowsr's business (apparently true), and thus it must be illegal. The company highlights how it has all sorts of highly valuable deals with other companies because of its analytics of Twitter's Firehose.

PeopleBrowsr's products are highly valuable to its users, who utilize them to
extract relevant information from the massive Twitter stream, as well as to organizations
marketing their messages or brands. PeopleBrowsr has entered into valid contracts including: (1)
a three-year, $3 million contract with defense contractor Strategic Technology Research, (2) a
long term, $400,000 contract with Cadalys to build a customized Kred application, (3) a long
term, $300,000 contract with Radian6 to incorporate Kred into its products, (4) a long term,
$400,000 contract with Badgeville to incorporate Kred into its products, (5) a contract with
Mashable to power its mRank product through PeopleBrowsr's API, and (6) a contract for at least
one year with DynamicLogic, worth at least $75,000. PeopleBrowsr has business relationships
that are likely to ripen into new business with firms including Dell Computer, Demand Media,
Ogilvy, Bell-Pottinger, and CBS Interactive, among others.

It is not difficult to understand why PeopleBrowsr is upset that Twitter decided to end the relationship, even as PeopleBrowsr claims to pay over $1 million a year to Twitter for access to the Firehose. The key argument that PeopleBrowsr makes, is that Twitter has, in the past, made various statements concerning its embrace of an open platform that allows others to build on top of their work. But I'm not sure why that's actually relevant here. PeopleBrowsr obviously knew that Firehose wasn't completely open since it signed two separate licensing agreements with Twitter (according to its own filing). In fact, they explicitly note that the agreement has a termination provision, so PeopleBrowsr had to know it was a possibility. In addition, most of the statements about openness that PeopleBrowsr cites, are vague statements about the importance of openness. Even the specific comments about keeping Firehose open are things like an engineer noting that he's "fighting to keep access to the Firehose and other API's as open as possible," which should have clearly indicated to PeopleBrowsr that the entire company was not in agreement, and there was a very real chance that it would not remain so open.

In the end, it really seems like the problem is entirely PeopleBrowsr's for building a business in which it relied almost entirely on a single relationship, and did not set up the contract to ensure that relationship would not go away. Again, I'm not sure that Twitter's strategy here is smart, but it's difficult to see how it's illegal. The problems seem entirely self-created by PeopleBrowsr. It even seems to admit that it bet its entire business on this fact, without securing a contract that they knew would last.

The Firehose is an essential input for PeopleBrowsr's business. PeopleBrowsr's
products function by creating a comprehensive view of Twitter activity, and a mere sample of
Twitter's data is not sufficient to provide the sophisticated analytics PeopleBrowsr's clients have
contracted for.

All that says is that perhaps they shouldn't have put things in their client contracts that they really couldn't promise they'd have access to -- or they should have put together a much more solid agreement with Twitter in the first place. While PeopleBrowsr may have won a temporary injunction, preventing Twitter from turning off its access to Firehose for the time being, it seems like a massive long shot to think that it can possibly win this lawsuit. Yes, it sucks that the one partner you bet your business on is changing its own ways of doing business, but that's what happens when you bet your business model on being someone else's "bitch."

from the lessons-learned dept

I had an interesting experience recently with customer service, that seemed worth expanding a bit into a post. On Thursday morning, I noticed that rather than the 200 or so Twitter updates I would see in my regular Twitter client, Tweetdeck, there were only about 15 messages. Something seemed wrong. I checked Twitter (to see if it was down), but it seemed to be showing all of the "missing" messages. I did a search, and lots of others were complaining about missing messages in Tweetdeck as well. I checked Tweetdeck's website and Twitter feed, and neither said anything about problems, so I put up a message on Twitter noting the problems, and wondering if I should check out Seesmic, a Tweetdeck competitor I had tested a long time ago.

Here's where things got interesting. There was no response at all from Tweetdeck, but within a few minutes, I actually received a reply from Seesmic. There were two things that struck me as quite interesting about the reply:

I had directed my original comment at Tweetdeck, but it was the competitor Seesmic that was first to reply. Think about that from a competitive standpoint, and how that changes the way competition can work. In the past, if I had a complaint about one company, it would be more difficult for a competitor to swoop in and offer an alternative. But, with Twitter, it's easy.

The part that's more impressive. Seesmic didn't slam Tweetdeck, or push me to move to its own product. Instead, it pointed out that the real problem might not have been with Tweetdeck, but with Twitter. In other words, it defended its competitor, and did a better job explaining the problem to me than Tweetdeck itself did.

That second point is, in some ways, mindblowing. And, even though the "problem" may not have been Tweetdeck's at all, I'm now trying out Seesmic much more seriously, because of the way they handled this "customer service issue," even though it was on someone else's product.